Movement Mastery – How to do Pullups

Big bulging biceps!  They’re the symbol of strength in our culture, yet few have them.  Plenty have tried countless curl variations, only to find that they’re not going anywhere.  Perhaps they should have started with pullups and chinups.  Pull-ups and chin-ups (chins) are one of the best ways to increase your grip, pulling strength and upper body size.  They work your forearms, biceps and lattisimus dorsi (lats), plus chinups work the long head of the triceps.  Having strong lats helps to balance the strength you’ll gain by increasing your bench press, plus strong lats actually help you push the bar off of your chest.
Sure, you could take the easy way out and do cable pulldowns or some other machine exercise.  Our philosophy on strength training carries over to life, and it’s that anything worth doing is probably a little harder than the alternatives, but it probably yields better results.  In the case of pullups or chins vs pulldowns, it’s a unanimous decision in favour of the former.  Pullups and chins require stabilization and move your body through space, whereas pulldowns and machines allow you to avoid this work.  Machines are even worse than cable pulldowns, because they lock you into a range of motion that completely prevents your body from stabilizing itself and it puts you at a greater risk of injury by forcing that path irrespective of your individual anatomy.  Strength built with pullups and chins carries over to pulldowns, but the opposite effect is far less substantial.  Since we’re going to do the more useful exercises, let’s make sure we’re doing them in the best way possible:
1.    Grab the bar at shoulder width.  You want to have the bar closer to your fingers than in the bench and overhead presses (those exercises need the bar to be closer to your palm/wrist).
2.    Take a deep breath in, push your chest up, pull your shoulder blades back.  Your shoulders need to stay back and your chest must stay up for the entire set.
3.    Pull your body up toward the bar by flexing your biceps and lats.  Keep pulling until your chin passes the bar.  It’s even better if you can have the bar touch your chest, but for beginners this will be tough.  Only count reps where your chin clears the bar.
4.    Lower yourself in a slow, controlled manner, all the way to a dead hang.  Your arms should be straight at the bottom, which may require you to keep your knees bent to avoid touching the ground.  As with clearing the bar with your chin, pullup and chinup reps don’t count unless you lower yourself to a dead hang.

That’s it for pullups/chinups.  Pretty simple, right?  We’ll go into depth more later on variations you can use to improve your numbers and strength, including variations on this time-tested classic.  For now, work on getting up to the point where you can do 15 reps with bodyweight.  At that level, you’ll have a fantastic level of relative strength and be ready for all kinds of new techniques.